New directions in the pursuit of Majorana fermions in solid state systems

J Alicea - Reports on progress in physics, 2012 - iopscience.iop.org
The 1937 theoretical discovery of Majorana fermions—whose defining property is that they
are their own anti-particles—has since impacted diverse problems ranging from neutrino …

Search for Majorana fermions in superconductors

CWJ Beenakker - Annu. Rev. Condens. Matter Phys., 2013 - annualreviews.org
Majorana fermions (particles that are their own antiparticle) may or may not exist in nature as
elementary building blocks, but in condensed matter they can be constructed out of electron …

Topological insulators and superconductors

XL Qi, SC Zhang - Reviews of modern physics, 2011 - APS
Topological insulators are new states of quantum matter which cannot be adiabatically
connected to conventional insulators and semiconductors. They are characterized by a full …

Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices

V Mourik, K Zuo, SM Frolov, SR Plissard… - Science, 2012 - science.org
Majorana fermions are particles identical to their own antiparticles. They have been
theoretically predicted to exist in topological superconductors. Here, we report electrical …

Introduction to topological superconductivity and Majorana fermions

M Leijnse, K Flensberg - Semiconductor Science and Technology, 2012 - iopscience.iop.org
This short review paper provides a pedagogical introduction to the rapidly growing research
field of Majorana fermions in topological superconductors. We first discuss in some detail the …

Majorana Fermions and a Topological Phase Transition<? format?> in Semiconductor-Superconductor Heterostructures

RM Lutchyn, JD Sau, S Das Sarma - Physical review letters, 2010 - APS
We propose and analyze theoretically an experimental setup for detecting the elusive
Majorana particle in semiconductor-superconductor heterostructures. The experimental …

Non-Abelian statistics and topological quantum information processing in 1D wire networks

J Alicea, Y Oreg, G Refael, F Von Oppen, MPA Fisher - Nature Physics, 2011 - nature.com
The synthesis of a quantum computer remains an ongoing challenge in modern physics.
Whereas decoherence stymies most approaches, topological quantum computation …

Majorana fermions in equilibrium and in driven cold-atom quantum wires

L Jiang, T Kitagawa, J Alicea, AR Akhmerov, D Pekker… - Physical review …, 2011 - APS
We introduce a new approach to create and detect Majorana fermions using optically
trapped 1D fermionic atoms. In our proposed setup, two internal states of the atoms couple …

Zero-Bias Peaks in the Tunneling Conductance of Spin-Orbit-Coupled<? format?> Superconducting Wires with and without Majorana End-States

J Liu, AC Potter, KT Law, PA Lee - Physical review letters, 2012 - APS
One of the simplest proposed experimental probes of a Majorana bound state is a quantized
(2 e 2/h) value of zero-bias tunneling conductance. When temperature is somewhat larger …

Non-Abelian quantum order in spin-orbit-coupled semiconductors: Search for topological Majorana particles in solid-state systems

JD Sau, S Tewari, RM Lutchyn, TD Stanescu… - Physical Review B …, 2010 - APS
We show that an ordinary semiconducting thin film with spin-orbit coupling can, under
appropriate circumstances, be in a quantum topologically ordered state supporting exotic …